1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a nail print apparatus and a printing control method. Specifically, the present invention relates to a nail print apparatus and a printing control method so that a printed design image is not printed outside a nail of the user.
2. Description of the Related Art
The nail print apparatus is a print apparatus in which a finger of a nail on which a design is printed is positioned on a finger placement stage provided in the apparatus main body and a design image such as color, pattern, etc. is printed on a nail of the positioned finger. In such nail print apparatuses, the user selects a design image which the user desires to print on the user's nail and prints the selected design image on the region of the nail section of the finger (hereinafter referred to as the “nail region”).
Conventionally, the design image is stored in the storage section of the nail print apparatus, etc. as a piece of image data and the design image is printed on the nail by adjusting the scale of the entire image data according to the size, shape, etc. of the nail region of the user. Such nail print apparatus is described in, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2003-534083.
However, in a configuration where the scale of the entire image data of the design image is changed, each pattern included in the design image may be deformed, or the space between the pattern portion and the boundary of the nail region may be unnaturally too large or too small.
In this case, even if the design image is printed within the nail region, the impression of the design image selected by the user is different from the image actually printed on the nail region. Therefore, the desired design as imaged by the user may not be suitably printed.
Moreover, since the shape of the nail region is different according to each individual, by merely reducing the image data, a portion of each pattern may be printed outside the nail region or the image may be reduced too much so that it is not possible to print in an image of the user's impression when the image data is actually printed.